RPM International Inc.

Good day and welcome to the RPM International Fiscal First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Schlarb, Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Rocco, and welcome to RPM International's conference call for the fiscal 2025 first quarter. Today's call is being recorded. Joining today's call are Frank Sullivan, RPM's chair and CEO, Rusty Gordon, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Michael LaRoche, Vice President, Controller, and Chief Accounting Officer. This call is also being webcast and can be accessed live or replayed on the RPM website at www.rpminc.com. Comments made on this call may include forward-looking statements based on current expectations that involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to be materially different. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please review RPM's reports filed with the SEC. During the conference call, references may be made to non-GAAP financial measures, To assist you in understanding these non-GAAP terms, RPM has posted reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures on the RPM website. Also, please note that our comments will be on an as-adjusted basis, and all comparisons are to the first quarter of fiscal 2024, unless otherwise indicated. We have provided a supplemental slide presentation to support our comments on this call. It can be accessed in the presentation and webcast section of the RPM website at www.rpminc.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to Frank.

Thank you, Matt, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. We're hosting this call from our Innovation Center of Excellence in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I want to begin today by sending our sincere sympathy to all of the people in North Carolina and elsewhere who were impacted by Hurricane Helene. The devastation is heartbreaking, and our businesses are contributing to initial response efforts to help bring some sense of normalcy back to people's lives. This includes Legend Brands, which is supplying disaster restoration equipment and products to help people and businesses save and restore homes with water damage. At our Tremco business, our teams are helping customers with roofing and other issues by providing tarps and generators. They're also supplying water and food to people in need, including RPM associates affected by the hurricane. We're all hoping for a fast recovery for the impacted region, and RPM businesses and associates are contributing to this effort. Turning to our first quarter results, I'll begin with a high-level review, then turn the call over to Mike LaRoche, who will go over the financials in more detail. Matt Schlarb will then give a balance sheet update and provide some insights into our ability to capture growth, opportunities, and Rusty Gordon will cover the outlook. After that, we'll be happy to answer your questions. We'll begin on slide three with our first quarter results. Overall, our associates are doing an excellent job in controlling the things that we can in a mixed and uncertain economic environment. This includes continuing to execute our MAP 2025 initiatives and capturing growth opportunities where they exist. These self-help actions enable us to achieve our 11th consecutive quarter of record adjusted EBIT. Across RPM, our associates are adapting to challenging economic conditions to continue to drive growth. This includes pivoting to growing end markets, finding new efficiencies in our operations, and investing in targeted growth initiatives. The cash flow momentum we built in fiscal 24 was sustained in the first quarter, where we leveraged our MAP 2025 to continue making structural improvements to working capital efficiency. This resulted in another quarter of strong cash flow generation, which enabled us to repay an additional $75 million in debt. Over the prior 12 months, we have repaid $453 million in debt, and the resulting lower interest expense combined with adjusted EBIT growth led to adjusted EPS increasing 12.2% to a record $1.84. Moving to slide four, our construction products and Performance Coatings Group led growth by focusing on the repair and maintenance businesses as well as growing in new construction markets. Aided by our entrepreneurial sales culture and broad portfolio of differentiated products and services for high performance buildings, our teams have demonstrated their ability to capture growth opportunities where they exist. Over the past several years, we have pivoted from distribution centers to EV manufacturing and battery plants, to the now strong infrastructure and data center markets. Despite the current no growth environment, both of these segments generated record EBIT margins, which demonstrates the impact of our MAP 2025 initiatives and how they can have tremendous impact with growing volume to fully leverage these operational improvements that we put in place and that are continuing. In our consumer and specialty products group, which have the most exposure to residential end markets, demand remains challenged. Importantly, they remain focused on executing our MAP 2025 initiatives and were thus able to expand adjusted EBIT margins despite unabsorption headwinds from lower volumes. Our adjusted EBIT margin expansion matched our gross profit expansion and was aided by the SG&A streamlining actions we implemented at the end of fiscal 2024, such that our actual dollars of SG&A spend in this quarter were below the SG&A dollars in the prior year first quarter. Overall, I'm pleased with our associates' ability to navigate the mixed economic environment and achieve our 11th consecutive quarter of record adjusted EBIT. Through investments in our business, and increased collaboration, we are working to generate volume growth and realize the full benefits of our MAP 2025 initiatives. I'll now turn the call over to Mike LaRoche to cover the financials in more detail.